“The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone [] is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.”

By Spitzgogo_CHEN. Titled "Niece & My Nokia 6230i (by Nikon D70)". CC by-nc. Flickr Hosted.

Jason goes on to describe some of the activities you can do at the same time as using iPhone applications, and the advantages one hand operation has — go read it and come right back.

The article reminds me of a concept that mobile computing buffs Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao suggested to me a few years ago, which really clicked for me.

You hold a phone with one hand.

Seems wicked obvious doesn’t it! It’s sorta what Jason is talking about though. If you use old school phones and dumb mobile phones with one hand, wouldn’t a “smartphone” need to be usable one-handed (or less)?

If I recall, at the time Boris and Roland were educating me about the death of PDAs and stylus based “smart phones”, but it’s just is relevant to the current generation of devices, particularly as Jason describes, these smartphones taking on more roles — camera, gaming, etc.

It doesn’t seem Boris, Roland and my discussions translated into online artifacts, but I did find one silly comment I made early 2007 , “One hand holding and navigation will be interesting, but it is important that it does it well, because I read somewhere that defines a smart phone ”. The iPhone does it well.

I’ve always gotten a kick out out of see people go from talking on a SideKick to typing with a flick of a wrist, or sidetalking Nokia N-Gage style, but why haven’t these hip tools caught on?

Should we be surprised that easy one handed operation feels good?

I suspect cognitive processes and social norms particularly in public settings play big roles:

• You use a phone with one hand and you always have.
• There is a casualness to using a phone.
• You often don’t give it your full attention.
• You need a hand free to interact with your environment.
• You require alertness in a public setting. One hand free in case a predator strikes.

• It’s embarrassing to give a device your full attention, particularly  in a public setting. Particularly if you are an adult playing a game or otherwise not being productive.
• It’s rude to not pay attention to the people around you.
• We are social creatures.

It seems to me that it’s only natural.

“Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily.”

Boris Mann, thoughts on Passion and Frustration, October 5th, 2009

"Three lemurs eating" by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

From starting a company with Boris and Co’s Bootup Labs to being the area experts for your company, you want three of you.

3 is a magic number.

I’ve always just gone with having one backup, but reflecting on it now, I should have two backups in each area.

At first it seems like an incredible amount of redundancy, but someone’s own focuses and work doesn’t go away when they have to fill in for you. You need two backups, two people who can step in to carry your load — each carrying some of your load.

This extends beyond backing you up. This creates a mesh of collaboration,. Having different collaborators (back ups) in different areas leaves no weak links.

Disagreeing about something with your backup? With three there is always a moderator / negotiator / tie breaker.

It’s a free event, and if your work is any way related to the web, you will be missing out if you don’t attend. Register now before the event is full.

Besides, we need to support the grass roots Victoria tech scene — stop the Vancouver tech drain

Dave Olson points out that it’s “strategically scheduled for the same weekend as The Great Canadian Beer Festival”. So it seems safe to expect a good turnout from Drucouver. I know Boris Mann will be in attendance, and participating.

I hope to at least make an appearance. I’ll be looking for opportunies for WordPress collaboration. But me making it there is based on the whim of my baby son — and I won’t have it any other way.

I whole heartily recommend you try the open source flavor of Movable Type. It is clearly a great product created by fantastic people.

If you are thinking you only have time to try one other blogging software than WordPress, my time and money is on Drupal. People bringing Drupal into the conversation as an alternative has been one of my favorite parts of the discussions. Built on the same PHP stack that powers WordPress and much of the rest of the high performance web. Drupal is the full featured CMS with the heart and minds of the open source communities (I hang out with). Its blogging experience isn’t as polished out of the box as WP or MT, but it’s getting there — and we’re working hard at staying focused and one step ahead of them

If you have time please do share what you love about these other personal publishing environment, particularly if it relates to something that annoys you about WordPress. This way WordPress participants can respond by letting our code do the talking.

If you are currently using WordPress then your highest priority will likely be to plan to take a look at WordPress 2.5 as a release candidate will be coming very soon — watch the WordPress Development blog for the news.

I’m disappointed by Anil’s “upgrade guide”, but not surprised. I used to greatly respect Anil Dash, but in the last year I’ve grown to mostly only respect his abilities. He speaks of sincerity, but I don’t see any other way to interpret the following comments, and other parts of his argument, other than being patronizing and insincere:

I should think that the WP community would be more frustrated with Automattic not having the 2.5 release ready (or even a release date) than with someone pointing out that there are good options for bloggers.

And from the same comment:

And honestly, it may well be that Matt isn’t used to the way that competition works when you’re a well-funded company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I know it took us a while to adjust to the reality of how perceptions change in that situation. But given that Automattic’s raised many millions more dollars than Six Apart, I certainly don’t think it’s unfair for us as an underdog to point out our strengths.

The least Anil could do was give us some time to spend some of the money before playing the underdog card.

He is also very passionate in the “upgrade guide” about doing everything first. I’m not really interested, nor do I think most people are, in who did what first. When I get focused on firsts, my friends generously either help escape my nostalgia or my indulgent in the latest fad. I’m reminded to refocus on substance, on how the details come together to create the experience, and what real problems we need to solve together.

Solving problems together is the spirt of open source. I explicitly pointed out that Anil’s post is on the .com blog, because although Six Apart has improved its open source message since I wrote ”

Movable Type 200% Open Source!” Six Apart can be an even greater open source ambassador. As I wrote in the discussion around the 200% article, the lack of open source messaging on movabletype.com is one of the things as an open source evangalist I find disheartening. Looking today I could only find a mention of the Movable Type open source flavor [sic] on movabletype.com down in the Pricing FAQ. I find it awkward then that Anil’s “upgrade guide” talks heavily about open source technologies.

I’m a little upset at Michael Sippey’s response “we’re here to compete” in support of Anil’s “upgrade guide”. I had hoped that Anil had made the mistake of writing such an article on his own. In responded to one part of his article I wrote there:

If you think WordPress is “provided by Automattic”, you don’t understand WordPress and how we and most other open source products operate. WordPress is nothing without the participation of the community.

All those other flavors of Movable Type aren’t open source. As I’ve been discussing with Darren Hoyt regarding Expression Engine:

A popular open source platform ensures maintainability (or transition to another popular open platform) and no vendor lock. Sure, it can be good for your own business to use tools that require specialized knowledge and much fewer people have expertise in but even then having to maintain it may affect your sanity later

Boris Mann, champion of Drupal, and VP of Product Development at Raincity Studios says it even more poignantly:

The “enemy” here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not
good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this
interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

As Matt wrote in “WordPress is Open Source“, “Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the [open source] one doesn’t allow any support.”

Matt wrote “WordPress is Open Source” partially in response to Movable Type product manager and lead developer Byrne Reese’s comment:

@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.

Byrne you or anyone else just have to ask. Actually, I remember you have asked related questions and I answered you as best as could there.

What we produce that isn’t open source relates to some of the work I’ve quietly (out of the public eye, anyway) long been doing with our hosted solutions. I’m always asking, what isn’t open source and why isn’t it?

Please continue to challenge us here, and challenge us more. Sometimes we won’t answer you as quick as you like or provide the source code as quick as you like, but where we hesitate it is most often to make sure that you don’t have to trudge through some quick hacks, but instead get to benefit from what we learn from them. As Matt says “there is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. ”

I do love the passion of the conversations that are taking place! But please don’t take my, Anil, Michael, or Matt’s passionate words on what is a better solution, we are all incredible biased — I don’t trust myself when it comes to talking about WordPress or the competition.

I remember reading the title of Don Dodge’s post “Vista more secure than Linux, Apple OSX, and Windows XP” and thinking “this ought to be rich”. I did have my problems with the article, and shared my thoughts on it (reading it now, I was a little too intense in my arguments — see what I mean about passion), but I came away really respecting Jeff Jones, Director of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft [sic].

Here is how Jeff ends his post “Exactly how biased am I?”

Am I biased? I do not think so, but let’s just all keep assuming I am, because I don’t mind. If I make comparisons, I’ll lay out my metrics. I’ll lay out my assumptions. I’ll describe the methodology. Then, if you want to dispute the results, debate the assumptions, or critique the methodology, I’ll ask the same of you. Regardless of the outcome, all sides will get presented, progress is made and that’s a win for interested readers.

That is where Anil’s article fails. His post is one sound bite after another without at least the minimum of links to the technical details. I also got a kick out of how he is motoring along with his “comparision” [sic] with WordPress, and then switches into “A Dashboard That Measures Success”, “Design Matters”, “Get Support Right From The Source”, which I’m not sure are ways MT differentiates itself positively or maybe at all — anyway, his case there is even less clear than the rest of the article.

Jay Allen also wrote “Nothing was said that was untrue about Movable Type or WordPress and, aside from the cheeky title, the post spoke much more to me about the pride and excitement the team has in their new version which they wanted to communicate to the world.”

If the article was about his team’s pride and excitement that would be awesome, but a large part is actually comparisons without context or substance.

But maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe Shelley Powers’ is correct and “Anil’s post was rather funny, and tongue in cheek”. Or just maybe, Anil read and misunderstand “Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar”

I’m really glad for Anil’s “upgrade guide”, because it presents to our face some of the Six Apart FUD that potential customers come to us with when considering either WordPress.com VIP hosting or the Automattic Support Network. As I said, it’s a great launching point for more conversations.

Competition is awesome. Most important is having different open source solutions with focus on different problems, or different solutions to the same problems.

It doesn’t really matter what I think. You all know where all our heart and mind lies. I’m most interested in hearing from people still living in a neutral nation, digging in and getting diry with the design decisions and technical details of the real challenges you need to solve, and how well the WordPress experience treats you in response.

Boris is a dear friend. Danny I recently met and was very impressed by. Their backers — well, Boris says they aren’t a fund, but it is safe to say they are very well connected in Vancouver and aboard.

When putting together a startup people tend to be most concerned with securing the $$. But there’s so much more to a startup than getting the seed money.

These guys will help you find the funding to take your product/service and turn it into a business. But what you will discover along the yellow brick startup road is, if you don’t want to wind up crushed by your house or enslaved by the wicked warlocks of the West, you need good advice, good advisors.Even if you already have the funding you need and know what you are doing, access to the best advisors is invaluable:

What we’ve been looking for is the wisdom of a very special entrepreneur who’s been through what we’re going through. Someone who sees things a little differently and makes us feel right at home. Someone with a long term outlook, not a build-to-flip mentality.

If I was putting together my own startup, I would ask, beg, plead, literally do everything possible to get Boris to be an advisor. With Bootup Labs that is part of the package.

Back in November, Boris let me in on some of the details of the “package” (and there sounds to be a lot more than just a package here. Lots of dynamic elements specific to each startup’s unique needs), but it isn’t my story to tell, so subscribe to Bootup Labs blog. What I want to know is how he will balance this and his role as VP Product Development for Raincity Studios — I know he will find the time, but I want to know his secrets